John Tyler Bonner

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John Tyler Bonner
Born(1920-05-12)May 12, 1920
New York City, U.S.
DiedFebruary 7, 2019(2019-02-07) (aged 98)
Alma materHarvard University
Scientific career
FieldsDevelopmental biology
InstitutionsPrinceton University

John Tyler Bonner (May 12, 1920 – February 7, 2019) was an American biologist who was a professor in the

slime molds to understand evolution and development over a career of 40 years and was one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime moulds.[2] Arizona State University says that the establishment and growth of developmental-evolutionary biology owes a great debt to the work of Bonner's studies. His work is highly readable and unusually clearly written and his contributions have made many complicated ideas of biology accessible to a wide audience.[3]

Career

Bonner was the George M. Moffett Professor Emeritus of Biology at Princeton University. He was trained at Harvard University between 1937 and 1947, aside from a stint in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946. He soon joined the faculty of Princeton University, becoming the chairman of the Princeton Biology Department between 1966 and 1977, also in 1983-84 and 1987–88.

He held four honorary doctorates and was a fellow of the

National Academy of Sciences fellow in 1973.[6]

He was a visiting scholar at the

Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation Book Fund Fellowship in 1978 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He died in February 2019 at the age of 98.[7]

Works

He wrote several books on developmental biology and evolution, many scientific papers, and produced a number of works in biology. He is best known as one of the world's leading experts on

slime moulds and he led the way in making Dictyostelium discoideum a model organism central to examining some of the major questions in experimental biology.[8] He defined the complexity of an organism as the number of types of cells in it though complexity theorists disagree[citation needed
], and he argued that both plant and animal taxa which have evolved later, have a greater number of cell types than their predecessors, and sought an explanation acceptable to neo-Darwinism.

His works include:

  • The Cellular Slime Molds
  • The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection.[9]
  • The Evolution of Culture in Animals
  • Life Cycles
  • Morphogenesis: an Essay on Development
  • On Development: The Biology of Form, Harvard University Press
  • Cells and Societies
  • First Signals
  • The Ideas of Biology
  • Sixty Years of Biology
  • Size and Cycle
  • Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
  • Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science, Harvard University Press.
  • Randomness in Evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 2013, .

His autobiography, Lives of a Biologist: Adventures in a Century of Extraordinary Science was the winner of the 2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award.

Support for evolution

Bonner was involved with one of the earliest American efforts to express scientific

Hermann J. Muller circulated a petition in May 1966 entitled: "Is Biological Evolution a Principle of Nature that has been well established by Science?".[10]
Bonner signed this manifesto, along with 176 other leading American biologists, including several Nobel Prize winners.[11]

See also

  • Biology Today, college-level biology textbook, contribution by Bonner

Notes

  1. ^ "John Tyler Bonner (1920- ) | the Embryo Project Encyclopedia".
  2. ^ MacPherson, Kitta (21 January 2010). "The 'sultan of slime': Biologist continues to be fascinated by organisms after nearly 70 years of study". Princeton University News.
  3. ^ "The Embryo Project Encyclopedia". embryo.asu.edu. Archived from the original on 2011-07-13.
  4. ^ "John Tyler Bonner". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-08-23.
  5. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-08-23.
  6. ^ "J. T. Bonner". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2022-08-23.
  7. ^ "John Tyler Bonner has died". 2019-02-08.
  8. ^ Princeton University (2011), Science and technology Story, "The 'sultan of slime': Biologist continues to be fascinated by organisms after nearly 70 years of study". News at Princeton.
  9. ^ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/evolution-of-complexity/ "Review"
  10. ^ Bales, James D., Forty-Two Years on the Firing Line, Lambert, Shreveport, LA, p.71-72, 1977.
  11. ^ The Day the Scientists Voted, Bert Thompson, Apologetics Press: Sensible Science, 2001, originally published in Reason & Revelation, 2(3):9-11, March 1982.

References

External links